The following first appeared in February, 2014 on the blog of Stanford University's Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies The Dangers of Discomfort or What does My Promised Land mean for Israel Education Last week, my colleague, Matt Williams, wrote about productive discomfort, that is, the value of making students uncomfortable in order to promote their personal and intellectual growth. He argued that the desire to keep students comfortable stems largely from a consumerist logic in which the customer is always right even when that customer is a student deciding what to learn. But perhaps teachers who want to “meet students where they are at” do so precisely so that they can ensure that the discomfort they create is productive and doesn’t merely alienate students from the learning process. Finding the sweet spot of productive discomfort is easier said than done (that’s the whole point of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development), and it is certainly a wor